May 24, 2012

Oliver Jeffers has created several beloved picture books, including Stuck and Lost and Found--each has it's own special flavor but all are in his distinct illustrative style that I have come to look for, and love. Today Jeffers' new picture book, The Hueys: The New Sweater, was released, introducing a new cast of characters and the first of a new picture book series.

The story reminds me a bit of Mo Willems' Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed, and the Hueys and bright orange knitted sweaters come together in a fun read aloud. Check out this exclusive author Q&A, created while he was finishing The Hueys, for some fact facts about Oliver Jeffers:

Do you have a favorite character from your books?I couldn't possible pick. I love them all equally.How do you come up with new stories? Does the character or the message come to you first?I keep a sketchbook with me everywhere I go, as you never know when an idea will give itself up, and everything in my brain stands an equal chance of being forgotten if I don't write it down. When making the book I think about the words and the pictures at the same time, as I don't like to have them repeat each other. If I can show how the story unfolds visually, I'll do that as much as possible and use words sparingly to tie it together.

You've used watercolor, acrylic, collage and probably more in your illustrations. Do you have a favorite method? Are you moving into anything more digital?My favourite method changes all the time, depending on my mood and the style of image I'm trying to create. Some illustrations are better suited to watercolour, and others to collage. I mostly go with either instinct, or whatever is closest. I have already been using digital for a few of the books. In The Heart and the Bottle and The Great Paper Caper, which were both mostly collage, I used Photoshop as a post production tool to neaten things up. Stuck was created almost entirely using Photoshop, where I would scan in pencil lines and splashes of paint and layer them altogether.

Your author photo is always you as a little boy. Why? Is that because a lot of these stories are inspired by childhood experiences?Perhaps a little subconsciously. It started as a joke, because I couldn't find any decent photographs of myself for the first book, and wasn't all that thrilled about the idea that my face would be out there on tens of thousands of books. I didn't really like the idea of being recognized. Ever since then various family members have produced all sorts of photos of me growing up, and its taken on a life of its own.

What was your favorite picture book as a child?The Bad Tempered Ladybird by Eric Carle, because of the spread toward the back where the ladybird picks a fight with a whale. It fascinated me and I stared at it for hours. I couldn't figure out why the whale seemed so big when the book was the same size as all the other books I had, and one day I realized it was because the ladybird was beside it to provide scale.

Of all the awards you've won for your children's books, which were you most honored by?Probably The Blue Peter Award as it was voted for by children.

What made you want to write children's books?I sort of fell into it by accident. I was starting out my practice as a painter and what started out as some sketches for a series of paintings, turned into the beginning stages of my first book. Once I made the mental jump, the transition seemed very natural.

Do you keep adults in mind when writing or just children?I actually only keep myself in mind. I want to satisfy my own sense of curiosity, with as an adult in today's world, and what I would have enjoyed when I was small.

The Heart and the Bottle is a fantastic and touching story. What made you pick such a mature topic for a children's book and why did you make the main character a little girl?The idea for this book was an old one. I was approached years later by a production company who were making a film about a girl who aspired to be a children's book writer, and they wanted me to create the book. After reading the manuscript it reminded me of this old idea and I changed the sex of the character and made a few other edits. The idea was that it would always be a stand alone book, which I'm now very glad of as the film folded under the recession that hit the following year.

What books are you working on now? I just finished working on the first of a series of books with a group of characters called the Hueys. The Hueys revel in the small and the pointless and through this they can explore some of the deeper questions of the universe.

What's your favorite color?Sometimes orange. Sometimes mint blue.

What's your favorite food?Sometimes pizza. Sometimes sushi.

If you had to be an animal, what would you be?A sea turtle. They live a really long time.

What's your favorite place in the world?New York City.

What's your favorite movie?That changes all the time. Right now its Harold and Maude.

What's the last book you read?I usually have a fiction and a non fiction book on the go. The last non fiction was Through the Language Glass, about how various languages affect the way we think. The last (good) fiction I read was East of Eden by John Steinbeck.

With Memorial Day a few days away, we thought we'd remind you about our Summer Reading store, packed with popular new novels from your favorite authors, from Clive Cussler to Cassandra Clare to Catherine Coulter.

In The Wind Through the Keyhole, Stephen King returns to Mid-World, the landscape he created in the epic Dark Tower fantasy saga, and Sookie Stackhouse is back in Deadlocked, the twelfth book in Charlaine Harris's beloved series.

Or get lost in the world of Thomas Cromwell, Anne Bolyn, Henry VIII, and the court of Tudor, in Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies, the sequel to her wildly popular Wolf Hall. (To whet your appetite, we've included a taste - scroll down for an audio sample.)

May 23, 2012

This week's featured summer reading author is Alyson NoÃ«l, whose young adult paranormal series, The Immortals, had readers on the edge of their seats last summer for the conclusion of the epic love story between Damen and Ever. Now, there is a new YA series from NoÃ«l to get excited about--The Soul Seekers. The highly anticipated first book, Fated (released yesterday), introduces readers to Daire Santos, a girl whose strange visions are a hint of her ability to travel the worlds of the living and the dead, and Dace, the blue-eyed boy who has materialized from her dreams.

Sounds like the perfect book to start the summer, right?

We asked NoÃ«l to share a little something about summer reading and she sent us the exclusive essay below. You can also read an excerpt from Fated under More to Explore, here, and check out an exclusive video from the author about the book below.

Amazon Exclusive from Alyson NoÃ«l:

If I had to choose a favorite childhood memory, it would easily be the last day of school.

Any last day of school"”they all held equal appeal.

Though I should probably explain that the choice is less about my not liking school (loved the early years"”later, school and I came to the understanding that while we may not like each other, we were indeed good for each other) and more about the onset of summer. The heady anticipation of three deliciously long months sprawled before me like a lazy cat.

As a native Southern Californian, the lure of summer was less about a spike in the temperature, and more about daily trips to the beach, a friend's pool, the couch in my den, or a blanket on the lawn in my own backyard"”always with a book (or two) in hand.

While required high school reading lists introduced me to some of my favorite authors, particularly F. Scott Fitzgerald, J.D. Salinger, and the BrontÃ« sisters, choosing a book for the pure pleasure of immersing myself in the journey (as opposed to analyzing and dissecting it for class discussion) held far more appeal. And because I came of age at a time when teen books were not nearly the phenomenon they are now, my high school summers were spent picking from my mom's extensive collection of Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon, and Stephen King paperbacks.

Since books have played such a prominent role in my life, it comes as no surprise that I made Daire Santos, the protagonist in my new young adult series, The Soul Seekers, an avid reader as well.

When we first meet Daire in Fated, she makes mention of a "water-warped paperback" she's been "lugging around." Although the title goes unmentioned, I imagine that book to be Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale"”assigned reading for her English class. Though, that's not to say she's not enjoying it. If asked, Daire would tell you it's taught her to be less complacent in her life and her thinking. A lesson that comes in handy when she moves to the mystical town of Enchantment, New Mexico and her whole world is flipped upside down.

Adjusting to a new town, getting acquainted with the grandmother she's never met, undergoing a brutal initiation in her training as a Seeker, fighting soul-stealing demons, journeying to mystical worlds, and falling in love for the very first time, don't allow for much downtime. But if I had to assign Daire a summer reading list, it would definitely include all of the books I read and loved as a teen.

As worldly and experienced as Daire is, as exciting as her life has become, I have a pretty good feeling she'd fall for S.E. Hinton's Pony Boy just as hard as I did. -- Alyson NoÃ«l

We're excited to share that yesterday we announced the six finalists in the 2012Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. The three General Fiction finalists and three Young Adult Fiction finalists were selected by editors at Penguin, but the winners are chosen by you, the readers. Want to take part?

What's it about? Giant moles and blood rabbits! Yes, I said it: blood rabbits, although perhaps they're better described as an interesting detail. But mostly it's about some very fascinating characters on an epic journey. For once the press release does a nice job of giving a good sense of the novel: "On board the moletrain Medes, Sham Yes ap Soorap watches in awe as he witnesses his first moldywarpe hunt: the giant mole bursting from the earth, the harpoonists targeting their prey, the battle resulting in one's death and the other's glory"¦.When they come across a wrecked train, Sham a series of pictures hinting at something, somewhere, that should be impossible...Soon he's hunted on all sides, by pirates, trainsfolk, monsters and salvage-scrabblers. And it might not be just Sham's life that's about to change. It could be the whole of the railsea."

In the age of celebrity autobiography and memoirs penned by twentysomethings, ghostwriting has become de rigueur in a dishy way (though I'd guess most practitioners don't look like Ewan McGregor). But what about the other side of the coin: Why would any lucky soul capable of writing a book with her own two hands hide behind a fake name?

Well, for lots of reasons, reports Carmela Ciuraru in Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms. Out in paperback next week, Ciuraru's light but intriguing history takes a fascinating look behind the scenes at some of fiction's most celebrated fake names, from O. Henry to Isak Dinesen to Victoria Lucas. (Victoria who? That's Sylvia Plath to you. The brilliant, depressed young woman originally published The Bell Jar under a pseudonym to mask her dark novel's autobiographical elements.)

Sexism was a popular motivation for 19th-century greats to take on new identities, including the BrontÃ« sisters, Aurore Dupin (George Sand), and Marian Evans (George Eliot). Unable to break into Europe's male-dominated literary circles in their petticoats, these talented ladies assumed men's names to capture the attention of publishers. Once their extraordinary gifts were revealed, their identities became public knowledge"”but to a woman, they continued to use male pseudonyms throughout their careers. Ciuraru notes that this allowed a level of freedom they may not have enjoyed otherwise: Sand, "magnanimous and brave," also cross-dressed, rolled her own cigars, and had lovers of both genders; Eliot, "a politically progressive atheist" and "formidable intellectual," lived openly with a married man for years.

The BrontÃ«s, for their part, were painfully shy, and privacy also played a key role in the nom de pluming of another mainstay of the modern canon. Charles Dodgson, a clergyman with a penchant for young girls, refused all letters addressed to Lewis Carroll after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland made him famous. Then, of course, we have the class divide: George Orwell's blueblood lineage disdained its native son's preferred subjects"”hookers, beggars, and "common" working men"”so the sickly Eric Blair took to the streets and lived among them. His metamorphosis into Orwell accompanied the publication of Down and Out in Paris and London, a semiautobiographical chronicle of the experience.

As for Samuel Clemens, owner of the most famous pen name in American letters, he claimed nautical origins for his nom de plume. But he also got a big kick out of tricking his legions of fans, among them Darwin, Faulkner, and Edison, the latter of whom proclaimed: "An American loves his family. If he has any love left for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain."

I really can't write a better closing line than that. Maybe my ghostwriter has a few ideas.

Food writer Peter Kaminsky, whose long list of achievements includes being New York Magazine's "Underground Gourmet" and co-writing cookbooks with some of the best chefs in the world, has written a book called Culinary Intelligence: The Art of Eating Healthy (and Really Well). I recently picked up the book and started reading... and a few hours later I realized I'd just spent a pleasant Saturday afternoon with Mr. Kaminsky's thoughts on food and eating. So I asked if he would write something for Omnivoracious and he graciously agreed. Read on for a taste of the book. As you'll see, there are good, simple ideas that won't starve you or upset your lifestyle. (You might even call it a diet book for people who love food and don't like diet books.)

Yep, the world is going to nutritional hell and we all know it. And we all know that fast food is often a fast track to obesity and worse. Likewise, most of us probably suspect that the game of agriculture is probably rigged in favor of the biggest and wealthiest players. Problem is, knowledge alone is not going to take any inches off your waistline.

Applying that knowledge---in other words, using your inborn Culinary Intelligence is the best way I know to trim down and stay that way. It helped me take off thirty five pounds and keep them off. Right now, in the sweet spot of the year with summer just about to burst out, there is no better time to get on track. Why? Because Culinary Intelligence is really about two things: using the best most full flavored ingredients you can afford and preparing them well. My shorthand for this is maximizing Flavor Per Calorie. So, yes, do like all the diet books say and cut way back on processed ingredients like white flour, soft drinks and sugar. But that's not enough -- you still have to find foods that will both nourish and satisfy you.

That's where"”to borrow a phrase from the Canterbury Tales (I don't think I got much beyond those few words in high school)"”"summer is a comin in." You see, eating flavorful ingredients is never easier than it is now, when backyard gardens are in bloom and farmers markets are bursting with bounty. Eating seasonally and local sounds good as a healthy eating motto, but in the depths of winter it takes a little more dedication to figure out what to do with the kale, cauliflower, carrots, turnips, onions, and potatoes that serve as fresh cold weather vegetables. You can do it. I do, with the help of tomatoes that we roast and freeze in the fall, as well as anchovies, olives and bacon which add salty succulence to everything you cook with them. Still, it's way easier to make the full-on switch to healthful foods when the strawberries are red as rubies, the lettuce is fresh as mountain air, and every week brings something new to market at the peak of flavor.

Above all, make it a point to have fresh vegetables and fruit every day.

Wait! Hold that thought.

Make it a point to prepare fresh vegetables in a way that they last for a couple of days. That way, you are not stuck peeling and cooking every day. When you buy asparagus, roast two bunches in some olive oil and reheat the leftovers the next day. Same with eggplant or zucchini. Make stuff in batches and then combine in new ways during the week. Ditto with chicken. Okay, it's not a vegetable but the rule of preparing in batches holds for things with wings, fins and feet just as much as does for things with leaves.

Repurposing fresh prime ingredients is so much better tasting (and better for you) than filling up on fast food or rescuing second rate ingredients with lots of fat, sugar and salt. No nutritionist will argue with that. If they do, you are listening to the wrong nutritionist.

If you get in the habit of eating the good stuff in this best of seasons, you will be ready to make it through the cold months. All it takes is using the Culinary Intelligence that we are all born with. It took our ancestors a million years to evolve our incredibly complex language of flavor and taste. Once you learn to listen to that language, the rest is a piece of cake, or, more often, in my case, a piece of fruit.

May 21, 2012

One of the best tools for analyzing writing is a concordance"”and one of the best concordances out there is Wordle. The picture at the top of this article is, in fact, a Wordle word cloud using all the text from the Writers Don't Cry columns. Beautiful, isn't it? The perfect representation of the language I use in this column, with the bigger words being the ones I use most frequently. And I think it evokes exactly what I want it to! Aside from the overuse of the word "one." And maybe I could cut down on the use of "just," too. And also, while we're at it, do I really use "like" that much? I mean seriously: you'd think I use it, like, every sentence or something!

But, back to the topic, aside from being pretty, world clouds are also super useful for writers interested in analyzing their writing. Particularly for those who want to analyze a novel. By looking at the relative size of character names and words you can learn all kinds of things about both your book and your writing style.

Getting Started: Wordify Your Book

Ready to discover your own language habits? Take your work-in-progress or a recently finished project"”or even just your blog--and run it through the Wordle machine. Click randomize and fiddle with the controls until it's in a format you find attractive and readable. Leave this window open for the analysis portion. Later, you can save it to the public gallery, or just use screen capture to save a picture of it, like I did.

How to Analyze Your Word Cloud

Congratulations! You now are the proud owner of a word cloud of your very own. Now, let's start breaking that beautiful beast down to see what we can learn about your writing.

In most cases, your character names should be the biggest words in a novel-based word cloud. In fact, if any words rival them in size, you may want to consider making friends with a thesaurus! But aside from that, the size of the different character names lets you know roughly how much space each character takes up in the book. This makes it a fantastic way to see the airtime each character is receiving. And if any one character is getting too much or too little exposure"”well, you know what to do.

After analyzing the character balance, you can right click on the character names (and place names) to remove them from the cloud. The relative size of the remaining words can tell you a lot about the focus and the balance of your book. For instance, it can tell you if your book is more action ("came," "went," "drew"), location ("door," "house," "window"), or people oriented ("hand," "eyes," "head"). In addition, it can also tell you something about how you handle character interaction"”like whether you tend to focus on what your characters are thinking ("thought," "know," "head"), seeing ("eyes," "looked," "saw"), or feeling ("felt," "fear," "love"). Or in dialogue, whether your characters are asking a lot of questions ("asked," "answered") or being more commanding ("must," "now," "you").

And of course, I'd be remiss if I failed to note that if any of the large words are generally considered uncommon, you may not want them littering your book. If not, thesauruses are dandy, and so is the backspace key.

Word Clouds Quiz!

To put your word cloud into perspective, I made some word clouds from some popular books throughout the ages"”from the 16th century to the modern day. Looking at the word clouds, what can you tell about the stories they're derived from? Can you guess what books these are?

May 18, 2012

Brian Francis Slattery's new novel is described as an "incandescent and thrilling post-apocalyptic tale in the vein of 1984 or The Road. In the not-distant-enough future, a man takes a boat trip up the Susquehanna River with his most trusted friend, intent on reuniting with his son. But the man is pursued by an army, and his own harrowing past; and the familiar American landscape has been savaged by war and climate change until it is nearly unrecognizable." This description gave me what I thought was a brilliant idea: why not ask Slattery to write a list of reasons why the novel was actually upbeat, a chance to focus on small victories, perhaps. But Slattery had other ideas, being a bit of an iconoclast"¦ - Jeff VanderMeer

Three Reasons Why I Didn't Complete the Assignment by Brian Francis Slattery

Lost Everything, as the title implies, has a pretty sad premise. In it, the America we know is visited first by climate change, and then the political and social fallout that follows"”the massive instability that, I think, could happen when the land, sea, and air change dramatically. When cities that used to be there aren't any more. When things don't work any more, at all. When plants don't grow where they used to grow, and new plants and animals move in. When, as George Carlin said would happen at some point, the world decides to shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

The original assignment for this piece was to come up with five to ten reasons why Lost Everything is actually kind of upbeat, despite its premise. But I discovered that I couldn't do it and say anything that felt remotely substantial. So I'm cheating by changing the question. Here, instead, are three reasons why I couldn't do the original assignment, which hopefully will reach the same end.

1. I actually tried to write a serious book.This is the third book I've written with apocalyptic themes, which, when I think about it now, is kind of crazy; seriously, I'm just not that intense a guy. When Will Hermes generously reviewed my first book, Spaceman Blues, in the Village Voice, he appreciated the book's sense of humor, but wished that once in a while I'd take the dark themes more seriously. I dodged that request in Liberation, my second book. In Lost Everything, I decided to take him on. That said, the book (I think; I hope) isn't a recipe for suicide. There are jokes, music, and parties, too. It's about people who want very much to live, though the world they live on is making it pretty hard for them.

2. I'm too close to the material.Unlike [my prior two novels] Spaceman Blues and Liberation, which I wrote pretty fast, Lost Everything took a long time to write. It's about upstate New York, the place where I grew up, and I'd been trying to write about it for years, to capture something about what I think I saw going on there. For whatever reason, I couldn't do it until now. Maybe I just had to fail at it several times first. Maybe I just had to live outside of it for as long as I'd lived in it. Who knows? Getting to the bottom of why, in this case, is probably impossible, and even if it isn't, the answer probably isn't very interesting.

But if Spaceman Blues, Liberation, and Lost Everything came from the same place"”the same set of questions, preoccupations, obsessions"”then finishing Lost Everything was like scraping out the inside of a melon for the last of the pulp, down to the rind. There's a lot of satisfaction in having finished it, along with the immense gratitude for the constellation of lucky stars that let me publish a third book. But there isn't enough distance between me and it for me to see it for what it is, its balance of darkness and light, or despair and hope. You see it better than I do. Which is a great way of getting to my third point.

3. My opinion of my own book is irrelevant.I've loved reading reviews of the books I've written, from professional reviews to comments on Amazon and Goodreads"”even when they're negative"”because I think readers' reactions to the books are way more interesting than my own. Some readers seem to dislike Lost Everything quite a bit, or think it's really depressing. There are readers who can't quite engage with it. Their reactions are valid and valuable. But there's also a group of readers that the book reaches; it hits them the way I was hoping it would. Their reactions remind me all over again why I write books in the first place, and it sounds so simple and trite when I spell it out, but that doesn't make it less true: I write books to connect with people, to make the tribe a little bigger. I want to meet you all, really, to shake hands and talk, to hang out, say hello again and again, so we all know each other as well as we can.

On May 22, 2007, the first book in Michael Scott's series for young adults, The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, made its first appearance. Exactly five years later--this Tuesday--fans will learn more of (the rest of?) Nicholas Flamel's secrets in the sixth and final book, The Enchantress. Author Michael Scott sets straight a few historical details about The Codex--the book at the core of the series--in this Amazon exclusive.

At the heart of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel is the ancient book, The Codex, the Book of Abraham. The story begins with the theft of the pages from the book and, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that not only have the Flamels and Doctor John Dee fought over the book for centuries, but that the entire adventure really began centuries ago, when Nicholas bought the book from a mysterious one-handed stranger.

Fantasy fiction is filled with magical books and scrolls, most famously, The Necronomicon in the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The extraordinary and shamefully neglected Clark Ashton Smith created The Book of Eibon, while Robert E. Howard, the creator of Conan, used the Unaussprechlichen Kulten when he wrote about the Cthulhu Mythos. These are all fictional books--but the Book of Abraham is different. It really existed.

Like everyone else in the series (with the exception of the twins), Nicholas Flamel was a real man and we know quite a bit about him. He was a poor bookseller and a scrivener. He would have bought and sold manuscripts and also made a little extra money writing letters for people who could neither read nor write. In his own diaries, he tells how he bought a 21-page metal-bound book from a mysterious stranger. We even know the price he paid for the book: two florens, and Nicholas leave us a very clear description of it. "It was not made of paper or parchment, as other books are, but of admirable rinds (as it seemed to me) of young trees."

Nicholas goes on to give a very detailed description of each page. The book was written in a language he could not understand, so he and Perenelle, his wife, set out on a journey across Europe looking for someone who could help them translate the mysterious text. According to Flamel's own account, in the south of Spain he met a man called Master Canches who helped him begin the process of translation. Canches explained that this book contained the secret of alchemy and that if Nicholas and Perenelle were prepared to spend the rest of their lives studying it, then it would reveal wonders to them.

What is clear is that by the time the poor bookseller and his wife returned to Paris, they had become phenomenally wealthy. The Flamels put their money to good use and established churches, hospitals and schools and were so well known and beloved in Paris that there are streets named after them both. The streets exist to this day.

The original of the Book of Abraham is now missing--Cardinal Richelieu is supposed to have had a copy, and in the Flamel's will there is a suggestion that it passed to a nephew, but Nicholas made copies, and these still exist.

Legend has it that The Codex was a book of alchemical formulae--a sort of chemistry text book. And of course it reputedly contained the great secret of alchemy: how to create a lapis philosophorum--a philosopher's stone (which was more of a white or red powder or sometimes a purple glass, rather than a stone). This powder could turn ordinary metal into gold and help to prolong life, making the alchemist virtually immortal.

Did it make the Flamels immortal? Shortly after they died, their graves were opened by grave robbers looking for jewels and fine clothes. The graves were empty. And of course, there are reports of the Flamels appearing all across Europe for many years after their deaths.

I spent many years working as a dealer in rare and antique books--and I loved the idea of not only making a bookseller the hero of a story, but making the story about an antique book. And, before you ask: no, I do not have The Codex.